A WD My Book Duo ran its two drives as a RAID 1 mirror — the safe option — yet still lost access when a member failed and the enclosure dropped the volume. WD's hardware encryption made the bare disks unreadable on their own. We imaged both, undid the encryption, and rebuilt the mirror.
The My Book Duo had been set up as a RAID 1 mirror to keep two copies of a large photo library and the household backups — sensibly cautious. But when one drive developed a fault, the enclosure took the whole volume offline rather than carrying on with the good member, and nothing would mount. With no separate copy, both drives were brought in together to be recovered properly.
RAID 1 keeps two identical copies, so in principle either drive alone holds all the data. The complication with WD's enclosures is that they encrypt at the bridge board by default, tied to that specific unit — so pulling a disk out and reading it directly returns nothing but ciphertext, mirror or not. Recovering a My Book Duo therefore means accounting for both the RAID and the encryption: image the members, undo the bridge encryption, and only then can the mirrored data be read.
Each drive was imaged — the healthy member cloned in full, and the faulty one assessed, addressed in controlled clean-air conditions, and imaged adaptively to recover as much as possible. The bridge encryption was then undone using the keys tied to the unit, turning the ciphertext images back into readable data. Because it was a mirror, either copy could fill any gap left in the other — the healthy drive covering the faulty one's weak areas.
With decrypted images of both members, the mirror was reassembled into a single volume and the file system parsed from it. The photo library and backups came back with their folder structure and file names intact, drawn from whichever copy read most cleanly at each point.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were whole, then returned on fresh media — a full recovery, thanks to the mirror. We made one honest point: a mirror in a single enclosure protects against a disk dying, but not against the enclosure, its controller or a mistake affecting both copies at once, so a genuinely separate backup still matters.
Clean-air physical repair of the faulty member · adaptive imaging · recovery of bridge encryption keys and decryption · RAID 1 mirror reassembly and file-system rebuild. Physical work and imaging carried out in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually recoverable, yes — a mirror keeps two copies, so the surviving drive holds your data. WD's enclosures encrypt at the bridge, though, so we recover the keys and decrypt as part of the job. Send both drives, labelled with their order.
It makes it more involved but not impossible. The bare disks read as noise because of the bridge encryption; we recover the keys from the unit's electronics and decrypt the images before reassembling the mirror.
Not quite. A mirror protects against a single disk failure, but the enclosure, its controller, or an accidental deletion can still affect both copies together. A separate backup covers what a mirror can't.